After losing a prolonged court battle to halt the construction of a new hospital in Braselton, BRMC CEO Blake Watts said Barrow Regional will continue to be a leading provider of quality healthcare services to the surrounding community.

Instead of battling legal challenges for the proposed hospital in Braselton, Northeast Georgia Health System officials are now planning for the new medical campus.

“This is a campus that is going to be here for decades,” said Tracy Vardeman, vice president of strategic planning and marketing for the health system.

The Georgia Supreme Court denied an appeal last week by Barrow Regional Medical Center, which was contesting the health system’s Certificate of Need (CON) for a new Braselton hospital on Thompson Mill Road, next to the Village at Deaton Creek.

With the state’s highest court ruling in favor of the Gainesville-based health system, Northeast Georgia officials now have the CON in hand and are ready to continue planning the South Hall medical campus. Last week’s decision ends a four-year legal battle.

“There was a planning process that was anticipated in the original CON application that was filed in 2006, so that’s very common for a project of this scale and size to have a considerable amount of planning time before you begin actually working on the site,” Vardeman said.

When word of the Supreme Court decision came last week, Northeast Georgia said in a statement that planning for the healthcare campus will take a “focused, deliberate approach with profound respect for changes that have occurred in the local and national landscapes since the original application was filed.”

That means the health system will, in part, look at the implications of national healthcare reform and other local changes, Vardeman said.

It’s premature to say that the slumping economy will mean a downsized project for the Braselton medical campus, she said.

“A lot has changed,” Vardeman said. “We’ve done a lot of construction projects on the main campus (in Gainesville) in terms of reinvesting for our community here… We’re going to be looking at what that market needs and, to me, that’s the bottom line.”

Northeast Georgia’s campus in South Hall is 119 acres — compared to its main property on about 50 acres in Gainesville, she explained. The Braselton hospital will include 100 beds and provide about 500 new jobs when it opens — possibly sometime around 2014-2015.

“It’s a little hard to say, but it’s probably in the 2014-2015 timeline, but that’s something that’s really under assessment right now,” Vardeman said.

The health system has already opened one facility on the campus — Medical Plaza I, which includes an urgent care center, an outpatient imaging center, outpatient lab and rehabilitation services and physicians offices representing 15 medical specialties.

Before it opens a new hospital for its campus dubbed River Place, Northeast Georgia plans to build a second medical office — although there’s no definite timeline on when that facility will open. Medical Plaza I is near capacity and a proposed Medical Plaza II will include additional physician specialty offices. With the property already rezoned and land prepped for another medical office building, the project could move quickly.

Meanwhile, the health system is closely working with the Georgia Department of Transportation — which will widen and realign S.R. 347 (Thompson Mill Road) through Gwinnett and Hall counties, next to the hospital site.

“The corridor is significant to the hospital project,” Vardeman said, who added that health system officials are confident that the road project will be done in time for the hospital’s opening.

Health system officials will also pick up working again with Braselton and Hall County on providing water and sewer to the medical campus, she said. Braselton recently applied for a $1.5 million federal grant to fund a new sewer line on Thompson Mill Road that would serve the hospital. The sewer line project has a total estimated price tag of $4 million.

Barrow Regional — which has contested building a new hospital in Braselton so close to Winder — said it will “continue to be a leading provider of quality healthcare services to the surrounding community.”

“We are disappointed in the recent ruling; however, the growth of our service lines and facility over the last few years gives us great confidence in the future of Barrow Regional Medical Center,” CEO Blake Watts said in a statement.

Vardeman said Northeast Georgia thanks the community for its support during the CON process for the new hospital in Braselton.

“We never doubted that there was a huge need there and that the application would ultimately be approved and we’d have the certificate of need in our hands,” she said. “But I will have to say, ‘Do not underestimate at all the level of support that we received from that direct community’ from the municipalities that support that region, because it’s supported by Hall County, the City of Braselton and others. That made our application compelling.”

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